The contrast could not have been starker. US President Donald Trump spent the 2016 campaign lashing out at his country’s southern neighbors, threatening to “tear up” the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), promising to build a wall on the US-Mexican border and pledging to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yet not long after the US billionaire pulled off a victory at the polls, Chinese President Xi Jinping presented a vastly different message in a speech before the Peruvian Congress.
“We should hold high the banner of peaceful development and cooperation,” Xi said at the start of his third visit to Latin America in four years, comparing the relationship between the tw